As reported here QuoMedic has represented their offers as agency for services to medical science and technology on the German Biotech Days in Leipzig last week. Today we want to share some of the main topics from the conference with you.

There has been a high amount of interesting topics within the two days. One of the central issues was about Big Data. The main challenge within Big Data is the data management in life sciences, which requires high attentiveness regarding consumer protection and data security. Bastian Greshake from openSNP informed about a biobank, which allows researchers sharing of data with colleagues to gain benefits for all parties. As an example he spoke about researchers who were only be able to positively test their Bio-IT-programme under real conditions by accessing the shared data from the open biobank. Our affiliate company MEDEORA GmbH is specialised on biobanking software solutions. If you are looking for more information please visit cloud-biobanking.com.

The thematic block of medical biotechnology held on Tuesday was about Orphan Drugs. Orphan drugs refers to all drugs developed for the treatment of Rare Diseases. Rare Diseases are defined as severe illnesses, which affect minor than 5 persons out of 10.000 residents. The amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) which has received a lot of publicity by the Ice Bucket Challenge shows a prevalence of approximately 4 persons out of 100.000 residents and is therefore a widely known Rare Disease, of which more than 8.000 are described.

Sometimes clinical trials for Orphan Drugs are the only option for patients to receive an appropriate treatment against their Rare Disease. Despite of this it is often very hard to conclude an adequate number of patients within clinical trials for Orphan Drugs. QuoMedic is specialised on patient recruitment explicitely for Rare-Disease-Patients and additionally offers services to enhance patients retention performance. These services include, amongst others, cultural adaptation and translation as well as the RSG® Card Global Patient Reimbursement Program.

The main challenge at the beginning of clinical trials for Orphan Drugs is to find the Rare-Disease-patients and to contact them. With the help of QuoMedic a citizen of Turkey travelled to North America and was concluded within a clinical trial for treatment of his Rare Disease. Furthermore QuoMedic helps ensuring the retention of the patients until the end of the clinical trial.

Authors: Dr. Michaela Stolz and André Bongartz